Effective Tips to Avoid E-Commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment

[Infographic] How to Use Conversion Optimization to Battle Shopping Cart Abandonment

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Effective Tips to Avoid E-Commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Business and trade connections are considered to be indispensable parts of human lives, as they allow people not only to get high profits, but also find and buy certain production. Currently, almost all business companies and corporations are trying to increase their financial assets and strengthen their positions in the business world. They aspire to establish their branch offices in different countries and especially attract new and lucrative customer audiences.

As a rule, businessmen can reach these goals by moving their ventures into Internet. This is rather obvious, as online stores are usually visited by millions of customers from all over the world, who don’t possess enough time to travel to traditional brick-and-mortars. However, after launching your eCommerce project, you shouldn’t expect that thousands of buyers will rush to your web store to order various products and services.

As the online business environment consists of a large number of eCommerce startups, you will have to do your best to outdo your competitors and attract your potential clients. Very often, by visiting web shops, customers want to purchase their desired things and enjoy easy and fast shopping. To meet these requirements to the fullest, online businessmen usually equip their websites with powerful eCommerce software and resort to all possible advertising techniques. Web store owners, who ignore such aspects, risk to lose both their future profits and client bases.

One of the main reasons why there are plenty of unsuccessful online business projects is the lack of understanding customers’ needs and preferences. When merchants organize their eCommerce shops and malls, they must take into consideration their prospects’ interests and provide them with high website performance, fast searching results and stable working customer services and applications. Nevertheless, even these website features don’t guarantee that you will be able to retain your clients and save your online venture from collapse. Luckily, in my overview below, I will outline major methods that will help you prevent eCommerce shopping cart abandonment.

When implementing your business activity, you should try to impress your customers’ imagination and touch their hearts. High-quality and bright pictures still remain effective tools that may come in handy, if a vendor wants to provide his clients with detailed information about production he offers. In the other words, when your website features more photos of your products, the higher the chances are that customers will choose your web store for shopping. But when you upload photos to your product catalogs, you should be very careful, as a large number of visual materials can also decrease your website performance dramatically.

Customer research shows that websites should carefully feature the products that are in demand, as customers plan to use these items for a long period of time. So, if you want to gain clients’ loyalty, you must write only truthful, accurate and informative text descriptions for the products you sell.

Advanced Navigation and Check Out Process

In modern conditions, plenty of customers leave web stores because they are unable to handle difficult and mismanaged navigation systems. For example, some online shops possess poor website design styles and a large bulk of useless information. These elements may hide important customer services and even whole web store departments. These distractions can also hinder visitors from accomplishing their shopping procedures from the beginning and at any time they want to buy a new product. Vendors who want to avoid these unsuccessful eCommerce practices should customize their web shops’ look and feel, and equip them with smart product filters.

Have you ever wondered why your customer base continues to decrease? The answer is simple – A complicated check out process. Merchants should understand that buyers visit their web stores for shopping, but not for filling in multi-page check out forms. Otherwise, customers will add such unreliable web shops to their black lists and forget about them forever.

Aside from getting hassle-free shopping experience, customers also pay much attention to delivery aspects. This implies that all buyers want their bought products to be delivered by a particular date, place, and without any damages. In most cases, not all web store owners can grant their customers’ wishes and offer sophisticated shipping options to their clients. Moreover, online customers usually stop their shopping when they are faced with unexpected shipping costs at the end of their check out processes. If you want to prevent shopping cart abandonment, you should provide customers with low delivery fees, attractive discount programs, and various shipping options.

When shoppers buy certain products or services, they prefer to use not only their standard credit cards, but also all possible third-party payment services. The absence of these alternatives can spoil customers’ moods dramatically. So, when establishing your individual web store, you shouldn’t forget to equip it with various payment gateways (PayPal, HSBC, WePay and Authorize.net), which will be especially useful and important if you have a large eCommerce project and plan to serve different audiences from all over the world.

Timely Support

Sometimes buyers don’t possess enough skills and knowledge to use and repair products their purchase, so they have to resort to professional assistance. Hoping to find answers and solve their problems, customers will visit online sellers’ websites, but they will find that there is nobody able to help them, as most web stores offer their visitors only standard phone and email communication channels. Vendors who wish to build strong relationships with their prospects should integrate their web stores with more advanced interaction tools, such as a help desk ticket system and an online chat option.

Talking about customer support services, I have to mention the importance of having a skilled staff. Plenty of current website consultants ignore shoppers’ inquiries and provide them with unqualified advice. This can damage web store owners’ reputations drastically. In this case, only experienced and well-educated support team should be able to help your clients solve their issues and protect your business venture from disappearing in the eCommerce marketplace.

Contact and Feedback Opportunities

In the 21st century, social media networks have become useful tools for all business companies and ventures. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, any eCommerce vendor has an opportunity to contact with their customer audience at any time and from any place, as well as find out their interests and desires. Using this information, marketers will be able to know the latest marketing trends and track their clients’ behavior to correct main eCommerce plans.

If customers once visited your web shop, it doesn’t mean that they will return later. Don’t be afraid and send them email reminders from time after time. This technique can provide you both with additional website visits and revenue. Do you know some other effective methods to avoid shopping cart abandonment? I am looking forward to see your valuable thoughts in comments below.

We have brought thought leaders, influencers, visionaries and veterans to our tribe. Now it’s your turn. If you have something worthwhile to share with a large community of savvy testers, go ahead and pitch your post idea. We’re listening.